"The trouble with Supreme Court nominations these days in confirmations, they take on all the attributes of political campaigns," said Duberstein, "from nasty attack ads to the expenditures of obscene amounts of money" by outside partisan groups.

Fleetway's panicked attempts to get creators to sign "confirmations" that Fleetway was the copyright holder on 2000AD characters clearly points out that they knew the legal situation full well and were using the carrot of a tv or movie adaptation down the line which of course didn't happen to get creators to retrospectively relinquish their legal rights.